


birds of a feather (or, how to fall for the weird new kid)

by super_fast_jelly_fish



Series: wait for me [3]
Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Body Image, Developing Relationship, Falling In Love, First Dates, Fluff, Genderqueer Character, Other, Trans Character, bird metaphors, body image issues, but go off ao3, i guess, idk why the implied tag is in all caps, like seriously an absurd amount, this is like 80 percent projection lmao, vent fic, what the fuck am I doing, you'll see - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 22:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18291296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/super_fast_jelly_fish/pseuds/super_fast_jelly_fish
Summary: Zoe learns to branch out and express herself more. She also finds herself a fantastic date.





	birds of a feather (or, how to fall for the weird new kid)

**Author's Note:**

> hey so um if u know me in real life, for the love of danny devito DONT READ THIS!!! it will ruin me and give me trust issues forever. this is some p personal stuff and if i actually know u irl i'd rather be telling u this stuff in person versus u discovering my thinly veiled issues by reading between the lines of a dear evan hansen fanfic anyways sorry if ur not one of those people enjoy this shit <3

Zoe meets him after lunch on the second day of school.

“Zoe, right?” He asks, all dimples and wide eyes. He looks like a human sunbeam. “Hi. I think you’re in my drama class. I saw you on the list. I’m new. Could I follow you there, or would that be weird?”

She agrees, because, who is she to refuse? Zoe sometimes feels closer to strangers in the hallways of her school than her blood relatives.

They walk down the hall together, Zoe with her purple backpack and her companion with lemon yellow.

“Hey, what’s your name, again?” She asks, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Sorry, I’m the worst with names. I’ll probably have to ask again.”

He laughs. It’s a nervous, tittering laugh, like the warbling of a bird. It’s been too long for Zoe to remember the nerve-wracking experience of transferring schools, but she sympathizes nonetheless.

“My name’s Daniel.” He offers. His sweatshirt is a slightly different shade to his backpack, emblazoned with bright pink letters that read _‘_ _F_ _REE HUGS_ _.’_ Zoe decides that she likes Daniel. “Or, um, actually, some people call me Danny. So. You could call me that, if you want.”

From the way his cheek twitches and his hand worries against the strap of his backpack, Zoe can tell that this means more to him than he’d like to admit. She likes the nickname. Nicknames in general, really. They’re fun.

“Danny.” She tests it out on her tongue. “That’s a really cool name! I like it.”

She means every word. Danny’s mouth turns upwards into a slight smile and his green eyes sparkle like emeralds. Zoe’s proud of herself for helping the expression get there.

“Thanks.” He says simply. He’s making a visible effort to contain himself. It’s cute. Endearing. Zoe doesn’t know what school this boy came from, but she takes it upon herself then and there to protect him from his new one. She shows him where to sit in drama class, which then rolls over into where to go after school, and the next morning she tells him about the coffee machine in the trunk of Coffee Pedro’s car, which is slightly cheaper and slightly better-tasting than the liquid crap for sale in the cafeteria. They meet up at lunch and Zoe introduces him to her theatre friends and after they have drama class and the whole thing starts again. Pretty soon it gets to a point where Zoe can’t imagine a life without morning coffee runs with Danny.

It becomes evident, early on, that Danny did not choose drama for his natural ability in the field. He’s too jumpy for the serious scenes and too slow on the uptake for the witty ones. He hums as a way of focusing, which is nothing short of precious on its own, but unfortunately off-putting onstage when the sound gets too loud to be ignored. Zoe knows he’s just trying to remember his lines. She tries her best to negotiate his grade with their drama teacher. He’s passing, which seems to be enough.

One day Zoe brings him outside to look over their lines for an upcoming sketch. This proves to be a mistake. The sights and sounds of the brisk September day only prove to keep Danny more distracted. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. He can’t seem to stop his eyes from straying from the script to a chipmunk scurrying around a few feet away.

After a few minutes trying to get him to respond to the same line, Zoe gives up. “Alright, I give up.” She tells him as much. “What do you want to do, Danny?”

He grins, pure yet conspiratorial, like Peter Pan incarnate. “Want to come on an adventure?”

Zoe doesn’t know why, but isn’t surprised when, she says yes. She trails behind him as he skips down the path, his blond-red hair blending perfectly with the changing leaves. He’s going towards the field, and the track around it, somewhere Zoe would never go without prompting. Not after she watched a classmate in freshman year have an asthma attack during the mile run. She’d dropped soccer not long afterward. It gave her more time to practice music, her first love, so she didn’t care all that much.

Danny bounds towards the large, elevated, blue mat used by pole vaulters to make crash landings. With a bounce and a hop and a jump, he pounces on the mat and pretends to hold it down like a wrestler. Zoe rolls her eyes, but breaks into a run herself and hops up to sit atop the big blue mat. Danny shifts around to sit beside her, reclining on his elbows while she leans forward.

“What’s the best bird noise you can make?” He asks. God knows why. Zoe learned after about a day of knowing the guy that it’s best not to question the route his train of thought takes.

She thinks for a moment. If she were with her other friends, the ones who enjoyed gossip and alcohol and making spectacles of themselves, it would be easy. She’d put on her delicate soprano voice and trill out the call of a songbird. Her friends would _ooh_ and _ahh_ accordingly, then each take their turn in the spotlight. Everything was a talent show with them.

Zoe isn’t with them, though. She’s with Danny Hanselmann, in the middle of an empty track field. She puffs up her chest, tips her head back, and lets out a guttural _caw_ that echoes in the wide, empty air.

Danny laughs, half amused and half impressed. He pauses for a millisecond, then says, “Hawk.”

She raises an eyebrow, but he continues before she needs to ask. “That was definitely a hawk cry you did just then. It was awesome.”

Zoe smirks. _Awesome_ is one way to put it, that’s for sure.

Danny takes a breath of his own, draws his head in closer to his shoulders, and _growls_ in an uncanny impression of a bird so well done that Zoe knows its name even before he identifies it for her.

“Crow.” They say, almost in sync. They both laugh. They do that a lot.

Zoe and Danny stare at the sky for a while, only coming back to the world when a car horn blares from the parking lot behind them. It’s Zoe’s brother, Connor. He honks again.

She thanks Danny for the adventure, and almost forgets to grab her copy of the script on her way to the car.

Danny says _anytime._

Zoe holds him to it.

The pole vaulting mat becomes their new place during lunch, grabbing coffees at Pedro’s and then heading over to their own personal dimension to talk and stare at the sky. And make bird noises, when there are less people around.

Danny knows that Zoe is… popular. It doesn’t appear to faze him much, that she constantly has her attention dragged in twenty directions by twenty people. He knows that she sometimes just needs peace and quiet. He tries to keep the humming down when she pinches her eyebrows together in stress. He also doesn’t mind backing away when too many other people are talking to her. He says their time in the field is more than enough. The effort is appreciated.

He also knows that he is weird. Danny is a senior transfer who doesn’t know when to shut up, couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, and can’t remember the alphabet. It makes him a target for some of the school’s bigger assholes. He knows that he isn’t the best for Zoe’s already-questionable reputation. Not that Zoe would ever tell him that. He just knows.

Zoe spends a good amount of her time with the seniors, actually. Between her brother, who she’s trying to get along with, his boyfriend(?), Evan Hansen, who takes film class with her and has good taste in movies, Alana Beck, the only reason Zoe is still a Girl Scout and not failing physics, and now Daniel, she has way less time to kill with her castmates in the school play than in years prior. She has to say, the freedom is nice. The room to breathe is a welcome change.

Her friends from theatre don’t share the sentiment. They miss her, as they tell her frequently. Every Friday they throw a party, and they beg her to come. _Next time_ _,_ she tells them. She tells them _next time_ every time after that.

Danny brings in a chocolate frosted cupcake for his birthday, and offers a piece to Zoe. The thought is pleasant, but she heartily declines. When he asks why, she can’t decide whether to tell him about her diet or her aversion to all cupcakes but chocolate with vanilla frosting. She ends up telling him both.

He isn’t put off by the cupcake thing, unsurprisingly. He does, however, ask why she’s on a diet. If it were anyone else, Zoe would be offended. But it’s _Danny_ _._ All she ever gets from him is waves and waves of genuine curiosity. So she tells him.

“I know I’m not... big,” She says honestly, “But I’m not small either. I’m average. I want to be… better than average, I guess. I’m hoping it’ll make my mirror hate me less.”

“I think you’re better than average.” Danny says.

She wants to object. He keeps talking. “Not just, like, your personality, but you. You’re a beautiful person.”

Zoe looks at Danny. His cheeks are rosy pink.

She doesn’t say anything about it. But she does ask him on a date a week later.

They go to the mall, at Danny’s request. They get pretzels and have an intense debate over Auntie Anne’s versus Wetzel’s Pretzels, wander around Target and play Mariokart in the gaming aisle, and ride the ferris wheel in the food court after a trip to the Disney store. Zoe holds Danny’s hand the entire time.

“This was fun,” She tells him, a little breathlessly, after a bit of window shopping on their way out.

“Yeah, it was,” He agrees. This is the most fun Zoe’s had in a while. She likes spending time with Danny. He makes hanging out far less stressful than she’s used to. It’s nice.

With that in mind, she speaks again. “Do you want to be my boyfriend?”

That was _not_ what she was planning on saying.

“What?” He stares.

Well, she might as well roll with it.

“Do you want to be my boyfriend,” She repeats. “I know it’s kind of fast, but I like you a lot. You make me happy. It’s totally fine if you don’t want to. We can take it slower if you want. Or maybe this wasn’t a date? Am I reading this wrong?”

“No, no, you’re not.” Danny smiles, wide and radiant. He’s the sun. He makes her feel warm inside. “I’d really like to date you.”

Zoe steels herself and pecks him on the cheek. He’s smiling so wide it looks like it hurts.

He buys her a pair of plastic heart-shaped sunglasses before she has to leave. She wears them all day long and keeps them on her vanity after that, next to a picture they’d taken together after drama class.

A day later she runs into her old friends in town. They’re loud and giggly and insistent, and somehow Zoe ends up inviting them over for Halloween. She hates herself for doing it.

She tells Danny not to come. If her old friends are there, so will lots and lots of booze. Zoe knows she’ll make a fool of herself. She doesn’t want her boyfriend(!) to see her like that. He doesn’t protest, so long as she agrees to hang out sometime in the week afterwards. Zoe is all too eager to oblige.

Of course, it doesn’t end up working out that easily at all. Because Zoe isn’t allowed to have nice things.

For one reason or another, Danny has to end up driving Evan over to the party, and walks in to witness Zoe in all her drunken glory.

She tries to kiss him.

Zoe is furious at herself when she remembers. She whacks her head with a hairbrush and calls Danny to apologize. When he doesn’t pick up, she sends him a message.

_Zoe: Danny I’m so sorry about last night!! It was awful of me to do that and if theres anything i can do to make up for it i will. If u want to spend some time apart i totally understand. Im SO SORRY_

He doesn’t text back for several hours. Zoe cries and feels stupid and writes an angsty song about it. She also hugs her brother harder than she has in several years. They trade stories. Then they eat ice cream and watch _Some Kind of Wonderful_ and try to forget the pits in their chests.

Danny finally, _finally_ , texts her back, as the guy on the TV screen tries to process his newfound feelings for his best friend. Connor looks like he regrets his movie choice. Zoe feels bad, but it’s still kind of funny.

_Danny <3: Meet me at the park? _

There’s a park in the center of town, with a gazebo and a winding pathway that Zoe knows Danny loves. It’ll be cold out today. She tells him _yes_ anyway.

He’s wearing a lemon yellow jacket. Zoe wants to laugh. Why would he wear anything else? Her own jacket is purple, though. She’s not one to talk.

“I’m sorry,” She says the moment he’s in earshot. He rises from his seat on a bench when he sees her, whether out of instinct or manners Zoe isn’t sure. “I know I said it before, but I just—I am.”

Danny nods. “I know. I’m not mad.”

Zoe flounders. That wasn’t what she was expecting, honestly. “Really? Because, um, it seemed like you didn’t really want me to kiss you? Which is fine. I’m totally cool with going slow, if that’s what you want.”

“I did want you to kiss me,” Danny counters. Zoe is confused. “But I wanted our first kiss to be, uh… not a drunk one.”

His voice trails off towards the end. Once again, Zoe feels stupid. And insensitive. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” He scuffs his sneaker on the pavement. For a moment, they don’t say anything. Zoe tries to think of something to chase away the silence.

“Could I kiss you right now?” _WHAT._

Danny looks up from the ground. He’s surprised, but doesn’t appear offended, which is always a good sign. “Okay.”

She nods decisively, takes a step forward, gets up on her tiptoes, and then Danny says, “Wait.”

Zoe waits. She gets back down on flat feet. She’s glad to wait as long as he needs.

“It’s Dani with an ‘i.’” He blurts, acting like this information is much more serious than a simple spelling error.

“Okay?” Zoe raises an eyebrow.

He doesn’t say anything else, but Zoe still waits. He’s worrying his lip and kicking the path again. Dani still needs to say something more.

Zoe takes his hands in hers. He’s got some freckles on his hands, like little spots of sun.

Dani looks like he’s going to cry. Zoe doesn’t know what to do. She settles for tracing circles among his pale golden sun-dots.

“I think I might be genderqueer.” He says at last, the words sounding more like a question than a statement. His lip is trembling and his eyebrows push together and tears fall from his eyes, and all Zoe can do is wipe them away and hope they stop.

“I support you no matter what.” She says in return, because it’s all she can think to say. “And I’m pansexual.”

“You still want to date me?” He asks, hesitantly. She hates that there was even a shred of doubt in his mind.

“Dani, the only thing that would stop me from dating you would be if you didn’t like music. That’s it. Anything else, I assure you I can handle.”

He grins brightly, wipes at his damp cheeks, and kisses the daylights out of Zoe Murphy, his girlfriend.

It’s several months later when Zoe finds a new favorite picture to stick on her vanity next to her heart-shaped sunglasses, after Dani’s first baseball game of the season.

In the photo is Zoe, smiling brightly with her hand out holding the camera, wearing Dani’s varsity jacket like someone out of a teen drama. Her indigo streaks are back in her hair, pulled high behind her head in a ponytail, with violet nails to match. Beside her is Dani, smacking a lip-gloss-accented kiss onto her cheek. Their baseball cap sits proudly atop their tangerine curls, and they eye the camera victoriously.

The picture stays on her vanity for the rest of high school. Zoe looks at it with a smile every day, because it's an eternal reminder that she has one person on her side. Someone to catch her when she falls, and to lift her up when she wants to fly.

**Author's Note:**

> dani hanselmann says trans rights!
> 
> so yea i might be what dani said yeehaw


End file.
